Our team has over 50 years of combined financial planning experience, with a big portion of that spent on research and report writing. In that time, we’ve picked up lots of tips and tricks on how to make the research and report writing process easier and more efficient, and this article will share some of our advice.

1.       Work Smart, Not Hard

One of the great things about working in financial planning is that the learning never stops. Even if you somehow think you know everything there is to know, you can guarantee that there’s a change in legislature waiting around the corner to bring you back down to earth. While this keeps things interesting, staying on top of changes can sometimes seem never-ending, and knowledge relating to some areas of financial planning can grow fuzzy over time without the chance to put it into practice.

With this in mind, a key aim for those working in financial planning should not be just gathering technical knowledge (though of course that’s important too), but also knowing where to look when you need a nudge in the right direction.

Fortunately, there’s a whole range of helpful material online. I recommend creating a catalogue of this information so that you can easily return to it in future. To get you started, here are some of my favourite and most used tools and pages:

– Quilter’s Tools: in particular, the Tapered Annual Allowance Calculator, Carry Forward Calculator, Chargeable Event Gains Income Tax Calculator and Scheme Specific Tax-Free Cash Calculator.

– Pru’s Tools: in particular the Tax Wrapper Comparison Tool, Bond Gain Tool, Emergency Tax Tool and Salary Sacrifice Calculator.

– Scottish Widows’ Tools

–  Royal London Technical Centre

– Quilter’s guidance on bonds

– Pru’s Technical Content

–  abrdn Techzone

Have I missed anything? Please share with us your favourite technical content or tools.

2.       Initial File Reviews

Spending a little bit of time doing a thorough review of any new case before you really get to work can save a lot of time in the long run.

It’s key to make sure you have all the information you’re going to need to complete the case and gives you the opportunity to spot any potential problems that might rear their heads later on. It’s much better to identify a problem early on than halfway through a case – think a pension consolidation exercise where it turns out that some of the existing plans have safeguarded benefits that weren’t made very clear in the policy documents!

3.       Collaborate

It’s all too easy to go down a Google rabbit hole when looking for information, but reaching out to others in the financial planning community first could save you a lot of time.

I’m lucky to be able to pick the brains of all my knowledgeable colleagues at We Complement, but I understand that not everyone has that luxury. Fortunately, there are lots of helpful groups available for paraplanners and others who work in financial planning, including on LinkedIn and WhatsApp.

In particular, the Big Tent at the Paraplanners’ Assembly and the M&G Wealth Technical Group are really useful resources where you can benefit from the collective brainpower of financial planning minds all over the country.

4.       Templates

I’m sure we all know what it’s like to work with templates that need a lot of tweaking (think adding in various paragraphs that are scattered across different documents, remembering to remove certain wording that isn’t relevant to some cases, or wrestling with formatting) before you even get around to personalising them for the client. Relying on memory to make sure you remember to add or remove content is not only an inefficient use of time but is almost certain to catch you out on a bad day!

Make sure you’re happy with the templates you’re using and how you use them. It can be a time-consuming task, but sorting out your templates and making sure that you have a slick suite of templates that suits your needs can save a lot of time in the future.

Ideally, you should have a range of easy-to-use templates available to you that need minimal tweaking, so when the research stage is over and you’re ready to crack on with the report you can get started without any fuss.

Have I missed anything? Please share with us your favourite technical content, tools or tricks.

Thanks for reading!